Japan has pulled off one of the trickiest tricks in space exploration: a comfortable landing on the moon. His “Moon Sniper” project landed on the surface of the Moon on Friday morning. But JAXA, the Japanese space agency, says that although the lander communicates with Earth, it receives no power through its solar panels.
“SLIM [for Smart Lander for Investigating Moon] has been communicating to the Earth station and it is receiving commands from the Earth accurately and the spacecraft is responding to these in a normal way,” said Hitoshi Kuninaka, director general of Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science.
“However, it seems that the solar mobile is not generating electrical power at the moment,” Kunaka said. “And since we’re not going to generate electricity,” he added, operation depends on battery power.
Kuninaka said that as planned, the lander deployed two small lunar probes, a small robot designed by the company that invented the Transformers, which now roams the lunar surface.
JAXA announced its good fortune and troubling technical issue shortly after noon ET. Two hours earlier, tens of thousands of people were watching live video as SLLIM’s lunar altitude dropped to zero.
“From the telemetry, what we see is that SLIM landed on this moon,” a JAXA expert said in the livestream, after data showed the spacecraft had reached its destination safely. The company then carried out a double check to verify the lander’s good fortune.
The lander carried out a series of maneuvers during its descent, from analyzing potential landing problems (using a preloaded map of the moon’s craters and other data) to leaning to one side when it came to rest on a slope.
Just before the lander touched down, it was to eject a robot onto the lunar surface — in hopes that it would take a photo of the newly arrived spacecraft. It was one of the last actions in a tense sequence, as years of work and planning culminated into one final make-or-break moment.
“The onset of the deceleration to landing on the surface of the Moon will be 20 minutes of numb, breathless terror!” said JAXA’s Kushiki Kenji, the mission’s subproject manager, last year.
Japan is now the fifth country to comfortably land on the Moon, joining the United States, China, the former Soviet Union and India.
This is Japan’s second attempt to carry out its lunar mission. Last April, a Japanese company called ispace failed in its bid to become the first personal company to land a spacecraft on the moon, after losing contact with its lander.
JAXA’s design team needed to create a lunar probe that was small and light enough to reach the Moon with the main lander, and also undeniably and physically powerful enough to work on a rocky, sandy surface. For answers, they turned to a toy company.
Takara Tomy, inventor of the Transformers toys, brought to the project his “knowledge of miniaturization and weight reduction,” according to the company, as well as his knowledge of building transformative mechanisms.
The result is the Lunar Excursion Vehicle-2, nickname: SORA-Q. In its initial round shape, it has a diameter of about 8 centimeters, making it larger than a baseball. It is one of two LEVs that will eject the lander when it is about two meters above the ground.
After hitting the Moon’s regolith, SORA-Q transformed, separating its two halves into independently controlled wheels. In this shape, a triangle-shaped tail protrudes from its back to help keep it stable. The robot also pulls a camera module out of its core.
With the toymaker’s help, JAXA “reduced the number of components used in the vehicle as much as possible and increased its reliability,” said Hirano Daichi, associate senior researcher at JAXA’s Space Exploration Innovation Hub Center.
The little robot will enjoy a burst of activity and fame before its battery runs out on the Moon. It only has enough power for about two hours of activity, the New Yorker reported.
Along with Takara Tomy, the robot was built with the help of Doshisha University; it uses a control board and camera that came from Sony. Both JAXA and the toy company say they hope the little robot inspires children to pursue interests in science and space exploration. Takara Tomy has released a civilian version of the robot in Japan.
The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, was launched into space from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan last September. It took months to reach the moon: after an initial pass in October, the craft slung through a wide elliptical path before achieving lunar orbit on Dec. 25.
When the lander landed on the Moon, it was dampened through five unique surprise dampers that resemble a cross between chainmail and an inverted geodesic dome. The portions were 3D printed with aluminum, creating a sponge-like grid that deforms on contact with the ground.
Part of the SLIM mission’s goal is to practice “pinpoint landing” — reaching highly specific targets on the lunar surface, putting landers in areas that may hold resources or unique geology. The lander is meant to reach a spot that’s within 100 meters of its target: sloped ground next to the Shioli crater near the moon’s Mare Nectaris (Sea of Nectar).
“The landing accuracy of traditional lunar landers is several, even a dozen kilometers,” according to JAXA’s press kit on the lander’s mission.
JAXA has already effectively placed a probe on an asteroid. But the company says that impacting a ship on the Moon is much more difficult, because “the dynamics are absolutely different since the gravity of asteroids is particularly lower. ” Unlike an asteroid, the company says, its lander is not capable of slowly descending to the moon’s surface and ascending if it wants to restart the process.
Longtime Japanese toymaker TOMY Company Ltd. was founded on Feb. 2, 1924, by Eiichiro Tomiyama. It absorbed the Takara toy company in 2006.
Takara created what in the United States would become known as the Transformers, alien robots capable of disguising themselves as cars and other machines. After Takara introduced the Diaclone and Micro Change lines, he licensed the toys to Hasbro in the 1980s, which branded them as Transformers. .
Of course, the moon has played a central role in the mythology of Transformers stories, most notably in Michael Bay’s 2011 work, Transformers: The Dark Side of the Moon. The film highlights conspiracy theories about the 1969 moon landing through the depiction of the Apollo 11 project. as a canopy for the United States wishing to seek out a complex alien generation on the planet: Cybertron, the homeworld of Optimus Prime and the Autobots.
This lunar project is reserved for machines, but JAXA hopes to replace it: It’s creating with Toyota a manned lunar rover to take other people into a pressurized environment. Scientists need to use the knowledge gathered through the SLIM lander and its probes to get the rover ready for lunar terrain.
Japan is a new attempt to explore the moon until 2025, with plans to launch a rover to the moon’s south pole, hoping to drill and model potential lunar water resources. For this mission, JAXA is partnering with the Indian Space Agency, which will power the touchdown module.
Efficiency, space, and weight are priority points in space operations. For the lunar mission, the SLIM spacecraft entered space via a shared ride, sharing a ride with the X-ray Spectroscopy and Imaging Mission, a collaboration between JAXA and NASA to learn about X-rays. emitted through celestial objects.
The “Moon Sniper” mission is just one of the ambitious projects currently seeking to land or send humans to the moon. A private U.S. company, Astrobotic Technology, launched a moon lander earlier this month, but that mission failed.
NASA’s Artemis mission aims to bring humans back to the moon, but the U.S. agency recently pushed back plans for a crewed mission around the moon to September 2025. NASA plans to land astronauts on the moon one year later, in 2026. Along with Japan, countries such as Russia and Israel have been sending missions to the moon, in something of a reborn space race.
“This is a much more serious and really extensive race because there are resources on the Moon, and those resources are limited,” Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi, told NPR. last. year. ” And countries are rushing to move to the moon to access those resources because, ultimately, that’s how we’re moving to access the rest of the universe. “